Because there aren't enough goddamn blogs on education.
Tom Bennett, founder of researchED, author, and behaviour advisor to the DfE writes the words the spirit animals tell him to, here.

Sunday, 27 November 2016

The light and the dark: Ofsted, Michaela, hope and inspiration

'Are you on Twitter again? Tom. We've spoken about this.'

Before me, on my writing desk, are three things: a plaster
bust of Socrates, one of Lincoln, and a small pewter Stonehenge. Unremarkable
choices- the salariat equivalent of a lava lamp maybe, or the moulded plastic
Buddhas beloved of garden centre grottos- but they are mine. It became a shrine
by accident. I didn’t plan their purchase or position deliberately. The subliminal
architecture of my world threw them together, and they are currently employed
as mandalas, or muses, or mementos by default.

Socrates pursued truth beyond all else, for its own sake
and, according to Plato, drank Hemlock rather than betray his philosophy. Lincoln
is an equally easy inspiration: the great orator, thinker, writer and wrangler
for social justice. And I regard Stonehenge with a childish awe, hypnotised by
its ancient enigma, a time machine from another planet, speaking of transience
and permanence and industry in one brutal monument. It invokes mystery
and mysticism and the marvel at the work of human hands.

These physical objects are trivial compared to the mental
objects they represent- the ideal form of our aspirations, however far we fall
from them, or ridicule ourselves in their pursuit. In Browning’s Andrea del
Sarto, the poet writes ‘Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp -- or
what's a heaven for?’

If it wasn't for bad luck, we'd have no luck at all

In a year that has already acquired a reputation for withering
hope faster than we can gather it, we need all the inspiration we can get.
Geopolitical earthquakes send tsunamis of uncertainty around the world in dark
and uncharted currents and we are reminded that periods of stability and peace
are probably the exception to a violent and less perfect norm. For most of us,
these forces rage at a height so high that they may as well be wars in Heaven,
and we wait for what chance and the tides wash up.

That’s why we need, more than ever, reasons to believe that
things can get better as well as worse. Hope, as someone said, can never be
false. If you were to ask most people what century they would like to live in,
had they but a time machine, many people’s first answers- Rome at its height,
La Belle Époque, the Renaissance, Jane Austen’s 19th century theme
park- are usually followed by the qualifier ‘and rich, of course’, because
being poor has throughout history been a universal shitstorm. Even then these fantasies
are usually discarded after a moment’s consideration, for the less glamorous
but more pragmatic ‘Now’ with its medicine and comforts and social progress.
Mileage varies internationally, but progress is irrefutable, however non-linear
it appears up close.

In education, my own small pond, the news is often wearying,
as we read of illiteracy, incompetence, venality and lack every time we open
our phones. You do not have to work with children for long to realise that in
every room, students carry bruises under their uniforms, physical, emotional,
and historical. That for some, progress is measured on a metronome, skipping
along, and for others you need a microscope and holy water to see it. Workload
buries many teachers; the lash of the inspection and the goad of high-stakes, irrelevant
performance management makes many in schools wonder what it was they loved
about the job in the first place.

And yet. We all find our own wells of hope. There is good
news with the bad. Like the recent clarification from Ofsted that clarifies- at
last- that schools need not display extraordinary levels of deep or arcane
marking:

Unless of course schools choose to have marking policies
that decimate their staff. And why would they want to do that? This page should
be nailed to the front door of every school like the Luther's 95 theses. Marking
levels has become abusive in many schools, as they panic to show progress once
lesson observations were binned as a metric. This one announcement could,
should, be an earthquake in schools practice. I wonder how long it will take to
reach every governor and leader in England and Wales?

The Passion of Amanda Spielman

Then there was the mellifluous sound of the Chief
Inspector-elect, Amanda Spielman publicly acknowledging that schools in poorer
areas were more likely to receive lower grading because of their circumstances,
and therefore the assessment of a head teacher’s performance in that context
was less likely to be a fair reflection of their competency or efforts.

‘Ofsted's incoming chief inspector has said that the
watchdog's overall judgements on schools are not a "fair way" of
assessing headteachers' performance. Speaking today, Amanda Spielman said that this was because
schools in poorer areas were less likely to get top inspection ratings because
they were "harder to run". She said that recent research suggesting schools with
disadvantaged intakes are less likely to be rated “outstanding” than those with
more privileged pupils, was in part probably a reflection of “reality, whether
we like that or not”.’

This is a fantastic sign that Spielman understands the impact Ofsted has, and more importantly will think deeply about how to turn the institution from a sword into a ploughshare. If anyone can, I hope she will.

Michaela School Choir Practice

What have the Michaeleans done for us?

Finally few educators on social media could have failed to
notice that the Michaela Community School/ Factory For Turning Children Into Glue and Tears (delete as your ideology dictates) ran a book launch that
doubled as a rally for their unconventional blend of traditional teaching and
21st century learning- ultra trads, if you will. Live streamed,
tweeted in real time, and punching so far above its weight that David and
Goliath look like a fair fight, it represents a new model for how schools face
the world. Scorned by people who have never visited, and often admired by those
who have, I have yet to see an institution that, in the face of such antipathy,
exposes itself so candidly to scrutiny, challenge and frontal attack. It’s almost
as if they knew they were doing something extraordinary. Twitter sizzled with
their battle cries, and it was inspiring to see so much positivity for a school
that has worked hard to earn it. All credit to their head teacher Katherine
Birbalsingh, who has two settings, as far as I can see: combine harvester, and
dead.

Green shoots, and good news. Maybe even ideas that will bear
fruit in the future. Who knows? When all the troubles of the world escaped from
Pandora’s box, the last thing left there was Hope. I’ll finish by referring to
the beautiful close to the recent masterpiece series True Detective (in an idea
possibly borrowed from Alan Moore). The two heroes, Rust and Marty, are
discussing good and evil (Spoiler Alert, incidentally):

‘After describing his near-death experience, Rust tells
Marty he's been thinking about the stars and how they've reminded him that
there's an eternal battle going on between light and darkness. Marty's pessimistic
about light's chances:

RUST: It's just one story, the oldest.MARTY: What's that?RUST: Light versus dark.MARTY: I know we ain't in Alaska, but it appears
to me that the dark has a lot more territory.

After Rust convinces Marty to haul him out of the hospital,
Rust presents a counterargument, offering the final dialogue of the season:

RUST: Y'know, you're looking at it wrong, the sky
thing.MARTY: How's that?RUST:Once, there was only dark. You ask me, the
light's winning.

2 comments:

Hi Tom, sorry to comment in the most annoying mode possible, the nitpicking busybody. I love this piece but two completely peripheral things stood out and urged footnotes from me. The first like the sore thumb I got when nailing Anna's CD Howe report to our Ministry of Education's door: The Diet of Worms comment. I presume this is not a reference to last June's creative protein milkshake binge. Rather, you mean Luther's famous 95 theses, which preceded the famous diet (and fewer than 95 graduate degrees being awarded!).

The other quibble is a bit more subtle: the reference to Lincoln as a "wrangler for social justice". First, I don't think Lincoln would have recognized the term. He would embrace that he wrangled for justice, but I doubt he would be a fan of the modern hyphenation of this important fundamental value. Indeed, if informed of the meaning injected into that compound phrase in today's political discourse I imagine he would have been repulsed by the idea. He was a strong proponent of the undiluted notion of justice for all, not that which is carved out and allocated for officially sanctioned grievances pitting the interests of identity classes against one another. The notion of Social Justice arises in modern parlance as a manifestation of neo-Marxian social analysis, a particular lens through which the concept of justice is pitched as contingent upon ideas of class struggle and oppressor/oppressed relationships. Marx, it is well-known, was a great fan of Lincoln, his contemporary. But there is no evidence that the sentiment was reciprocal; and some reason to believe that it was not, for Lincoln's own lens held freedom and autonomy in a much higher regard and he would have looked on Marx's prescriptions with some concern.

a) Quite right- the perils of the solo edit; updated it, but let the record show my original allusion was to the Diet of Wormsb) Oh I'd agree, Lincoln's approach to social justice is a light year away from the contemporary interpretation of that movement (or at least some interpretations of it). I meant it more broadly, on the assumption that no one yet holds copyright to the concept of justice, applied across a social sphere, which is clearly one of Lincoln's concerns.